Captchas are the Internet's speed bump. They perform little function beyond slowing users down—not bots, mind you, just people. But now Google's found a way to employ the oddly-fonted phrases for a different kind of verification.

Captcha systems, those psychedelic-font phrases designed to weed out bots from users, are a staple…
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ReCAPTCHAs are the second generation of Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, designed at Carnegie Mellon University and purchased by Google in 2009. In addition to blocking bots, these challenge phrases also assisted Google's text digitization efforts. ReCAPTCHAs traditionally only display text-based challenges yet, as the image above shows, have also begun adding image-based challenges too. But why do the images all look like cropped Street View shots? Because they are.

According to Google,

We're currently running an experiment in which characters from Street View images are appearing in CAPTCHAs. We often extract data such as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery to improve Google Maps with useful information like business addresses and locations. Based on the data and results of these reCaptcha tests, we'll determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online.

So basically, Google's crowd-sourcing data verification services that would be more expensive and labor-intensive if done by computers and imaging algorithms. Not only does it provide a new means of fighting spam and bots, it will also make Google Maps more accurate—that's a win-win for Google and users. [TechCrunch - Image: Dirtbag / Blackhatworld]